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Podcast #6, Technology: The Good, The Bad and The Existential.

“We’ve arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology.”–Carl Sagan

Here Be Dragons, Science Technology and The Future of Humanityby Olle Häggström

Technology. We certainly do depend on it. It does great things for us, but it also can annoy us and, indeed, has the potential to do us outright harm. In this episode of Seeking Delphi, I talk to author Olle Häggström about some of the existential risks that technology may pose to humanity. His book, Here Be Dragons, is a thorough examination of a wide ranging inventory of potential dangers, from the ones we currently know and worry about (climate change, nuclear war), to the ones that yet might be (bio terrorism, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence) ,and the ones Hollywood fantasizes about (alien invasion). Olle is a professor of mathematics at Chalmers University of Technology in Göteborg, Sweden. I called him there to conduct the interview for this episode.

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